For many years now, I’ve noticed that when I look at an advertisement, be it in a magazine, a newspaper, or on a billboard, I often ignore the communication and am more inclined to critique it. Is the imagery suitable and well done? Is the copy pithy or funny enough? Is the layout busy or uncluttered?

Even when an ad works, in that I look at it, read it and get hooked by it, I still find myself saying, “niiice,” at the end of it, rather than thinking about the company, brand or offer being sold.

I tend to wonder who created the work, rather than allow any benefit to be given to the advertiser — “The XYZ ad was really nice. EFG did a really good job with it”.

How about you? Are we all ignoring the message in others work and being critics? Can we be sold to, since we know (or assume) that the advertiser had little to do with the ads we see?

Note to the nine people who read this blog: I’m smack in the middle of developing some work for a pitch, and have been pretty tied up with work. Because of this, I’m going to be a bit irregular about posting here.

I think these ads are a powerful use of national flags, given that they’re normally a symbol of pride. That’s been turned on its head here. Stunning stuff.

I came across eight of them and they’re all equally good.

Some information about the work, pasted from here.

Grande Reportagem is a Portuguese news magazine that is recognised for its investigative reports and excellent photo-journalism. In 2004 the magazine switched from being an independent monthly publication to a weekly supplement in the Saturday edition of the daily national newspaper Diário de Notícias, owned by the same publishing company.The creative challenge of the campaign was to reaffirm the magazine’s unchanged commitment to serious journalism by focusing on topics that are important for people’s understanding of the world today.

This led the creative team to the concept “Meet the world” and to the idea of using flags of different nations as vehicles to transmit it. In each case, the colours that appear on various national flags were used to symbolise a social or political issue that is specific to the country in question.

I finally got around to putting more than a lame two lines on this blog’s About Me page, so if you’re curious about who writing you’re reading, go and have a look.

Earlier today, I was wrestling around with my son and he suddenly stops playing to say something to me… something totally out of the blue. He had, I guess, decided that I’m a little to liberal with my use of profanity around the house and started with, “Baba, don’t say bad words anymore.”

He then paused for a brief second, perhaps to lend dramatic effect since his tone was about to be completely normal — and I mean a totally non-plussed kind of normal. Not the kind of tone that you’d expect from a child who knows he’s about to say something he’s not allowed to, but also knows that he’s managed to find a loophole in the rules of language that govern children and wants you to know that you just got gamed. This is normal normal, like he’s about to tell me about his bike or something.

Anyway, let’s back up a bit for the sake of continuity. We wrestled. He stopped. He spoke. Out his mouth came, “Baba, don’t say bad words. (’One Mississippi’ pause) Don’t say ‘fuck’ anymore. ‘Fuck’ isn’t a nice word. Okay?”

The amusing thing (Yes, all I found it was amusing) about this was that I hadn’t said anything that involved the word all day. I have no idea what prompted him to say that to me at that moment.

I responded in the way that I think one should respond in these situations. I looked back at him calmly, without any bemusement or anger, and told him that I wouldn’t.

He then snuck in a quick punch-slap to my face and we resumed the wrestling.

I came across these three print ads for Companhia Athletica at Ads of the World a few days ago. I thought they were great and especially liked how the third ad shows the man trying to block the inflow of soda. You’ll have to go to AOTW to see the larger versions of each ad (You really should — they’re that nice.)

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